05/14/07 10:53 PM
I’m not sure where I stumbled across reading about this book, but somewhere along the way during the past two months it found its way onto my Amazon wishlist and finally into my personal library. Originally written back in the 1940s, A Technique for Producing Ideas is basically exactly what the title states. James Young put it together at the time as a way to lay out the creative process for advertisers, but it really pretty much applies to any discipline.
I bought the book because I was feeling like I was stuck in somewhat of a creative rut and thought it might provide a slightly different perspective on things, but after spinning through the short book (in about thirty minutes), I realized that the process layed out on the pages within was actually remarkably similar to the one that I already use.
The basic gist of it is to work on your idea by throwing out any and all related thoughts during the first part, then trying to visualize ways to bring these (sometimes somewhat disparate) pieces together. If you run into a figurative wall, clear your head with something unrelated, then try things from a different angle.
That’s the basic framework of the book, and it’s better stated within, but I guess I was hoping for a slightly different angle. Fortunately, I feel like I broke free a bit from my slump since before I even read it. My solution was about the same cost as the book itself; a bottle of wine.
May 25th, 2007 at 9:54 am
i’m not sure if you’ve heard of oblique strategies before or not. it’s a deck of cards you shuffle and select at random when you’re running into a wall creatively. brian eno and (i think) peter schmidt developed them together. pretty interesting. you can find little apps for both windows and mac to run on your machine instead of buying the deck. though i have to admit, having a physical object is often way more stimulating than this little thing on the screen that you’re supposed to contemplate, in order to get your creative juices flowing.
cheers!